pr, journalism, blogs, and going off on a tangent.

Email made it too easy.

As soon as you could build a list of contacts, reach each one of them seemingly individually, and fire everything at them instantaneously, building a tight, targeted, well maintained list fell off most PR firms radar - and, depressingly, with good reason.  If you can send out a loosely targeted blast, and then follow up with a series of tightly, carefully targeted pitches, it's possible to get more results for a minimally greater amount of work.

But it involves a lot of risk, because PR is a reputation and relationship business.  Now, though irritated, traditional media journalists have learned to tolerate this.  While reporting may be a vocation, a calling, and an integral part of identity, in the end it's a job, done to secure the means of live a comfortable life.

Blogs are different.  The majority of them don't result in rich writers, and the ones that are centered on a personality/brand rather than a brand, and then hired personalities, are as much identity as work.  If you email a blogger, there's a good chance it's at the address his friends email him at.  If you ignore his published history, you aren't ignoring the last 6 weeks of his work, you're ignoring the last 6 weeks of his ideas, conclusions, and concepts.  Blogs are more personal.  At least, based on my experience blogging and my interactions with journalists.

The long and short is, blogging is comparatively new, influential, and generally not willing to conform to the rules of the game as it is played.  There is both more (in a personal sense) and less (in a financial sense) on the line.  What amuses me is, the journalists who will get high and mighty about the importance of their industry in a proper democracy are usually half as uptight about freedoms and independence as bloggers who cover the same information.  And, those same journalists are twice as uptight about standards, sourcing, and credibility of the reportage.

I realize I wrote bitterly yesterday about the quarterly crucifixion of PR at the hands of the social media punditerati, and I don't really think I was wrong.

But if I'm going to expect new media publishers and creators to accept that there is a lot of good in my industry despite failings, I'm also going to have to ask PR to recognize that expecting anyone they interact with to behave the same, despite the differences in mandate, delivery, drives and accountability, is insane.

The right message, in the right way, to the right person.  Sounds so damn easy, but it's also more or less the only question in communication theory, asked a thousand different ways.